Olwyn & Josie

Travel information

We are currently

Description

Hi, we're Olwyn & Meander. Olwyn is the red-head (when she isn't existing in black & white) and presently a disability support worker, while Meander is the close-cropped one and works in early childhood education! As you can see on our profile, Meander's name is listed as 'Josie', which is Meander's legal name, and while they will respond to it, 'Meander' is their long-standing preferred name.

We met in Aotearoa/New Zealand six years ago and have been working on the Australian mainland for the last two and a half years. Now, we are moving forward with our plan to make Lutruwita/Tasmania home and we could not be more eager to have some time to immerse ourselves in the land and culture before we settle in Nipaluna/Hobart.

We bonded over a shared desire to take action on climate change, and have worked hard over the past 5 years to gather the resources to make our vision of communal living and resilience more concrete. We share a love of poetry, music, crafting, activism, foraging, and wild spaces, and are both on a bit of a cultural reclamation journey, exploring our place as descendants of both colonisers and historically colonised people, and interrogating our practices in how we engage with landscapes.

Olwyn has extensive experience with diverse workaways in Europe, and together we have done multiple workaways in Aotearoa/New Zealand. We're hoping to add to our experience and skills in natural building, syntropic agroforestry and permaculture, crafting, bee keeping, animal husbandry, water management, and renewable energy systems.

We're so looking forward to meeting you, if our paths cross, and contributing to your project in what ways we can.

Interests

Culture

Cooking & food

Sustainability

Animals

Books

Architecture

Carpentry

Hiking

Gardening

Music

Plant care

Writing

Sailing / Boating

Vegetarian or vegan

Politics / Social justice

Nature

LGBTQ

Hitchhiking

Cycling

DIY & crafts

Languages spoken

English: Fluent

Skills and knowledge we'd like to share or learn

Some knowledge of:  

Gardening

DIY and building projects

Animal Care

Life at a Farmstay

Creating/ Cooking family meals

Helping around the house

General Maintenance

Helping with Computers/ Internet

Eco Projects

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Able to teach about:  

Babysitting and creative play

More details about your skills

Olwyn - I've had a few quite disparate lives and jobs. Primarily I'd say my skills lie in woodwork and carpentry, having trained as a furniture maker, but it's been a number of years since I had access to a workshop, so I'm a little rusty. I've also worked as a bicycle mechanic, and can generally figure out most simple mechanical problems.
Through workaways and community organisations I have some experience in compost management, vegetable gardening, light earth building, landscaping, building restoration, animal rescue, viticulture, and fermentation.
I'm a problem solver. Give me a task and a set of resources and I'll generally find a way, even if I have to MacGyver something to do it.

Meander - Unlike Olwyn, my clay is waiting to be molded into something more specialised. At the moment, I'm a generalist with three natural predispositions - I'm very good at befriending little ones (hence the career choice of working with youth) ,I'm adept at research and I thrive on manual labour. I want to gain practical experience of that which I've researched (mostly permaculture and agroforestry precepts), but if you also have a wood splitting and stacking task that'll take four hours or an entire backyard of acanthus that needs uprooting, I'll get that done for you.

Age

33 & 30

What else ...

Meander is Type 1 diabetic, so may need to take breaks occasionally to treat low blood sugars, but we will supply juice/jellybeans. A medical event is theoretically possible, but we've never had it happen, and are very experienced and can handle this if it does occur.

Olwyn is a transgender woman and uses she/her pronouns. Obviously this isn't relevant, but if you have any strong negative feelings about this, perhaps we aren't the right choice. She is very open to discussing her experience of this, and happy to answer most respectful questions.

Some more information

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  Smoker

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  Driver's licence

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  Allergies

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  Special dietary requirements
  Mostly vegan, but both of us will eat eggs from happy chickens.